A key indicator of how perfective a society is, is how important the typical subject matter is in the popular culture and media (including cable news media and the internet).
Concretization question: How important is the typical subject matter on Glenn Greenwald and Glenn Beck's (call 'em "The Glenns" for convenience) columns/programs, as compared with (i.e., contrasted to) the rest of the media? How about Noam Chomsky? Whatever else you think of him, the shit he typically talks about is damn important. And how about what representative members of the Ayn Rand Society have to talk about, as it relates to contemporary political culture? Why aren't they prominent in today's mass-media discussion?Wouldn't they have the most of importance to offer in explanation of this whole "Ayn Rand phenomenon?" (One of them is a prominent Aristotle scholar currently at the No. 3 ranked department of philosophy in the English-speaking world, for crying out loud - and is editing a volume on Ayn Rand's epistemology due out this summer, as well another, much-anticipated Wiley-Blackwell volume due out hopefully in the very near future. Which would be of greater importance for understanding Rand's Objectivist ideas, that or the next rendition of Ayn Rand Nation by a fuckin' amateur? Which will the leftwing interblogs devote their attention to this time around? Last time around, with near-identical publication dates ca. March 2012, it was Gary Weiss's Ayn Rand Nation getting all their attention, with Leonard Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism getting none of their attention.) I mean, how fucking low does a culture have to be for their voices not being the most prominent in media discussions of Ayn Rand? Isn't that pretty much as pathetically bad as Chomsky not being all over the popular media?
Relevant distinction: "Intellectually high-brow" and "Important" (also consider: "Relevant")
More to come . . . .
#saganized
P.S. Another checkmate to come . . .
P.P.S. 24 days left...
Showing posts with label chomsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chomsky. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Friday, January 25, 2013
Chomsky, Dershowitz, and Taba
In 2005, notable adversaries on the Israel-Palestinian situation, Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz, debated the subject at Harvard. (TRANSCRIPT) These are perhaps the most formidable opponents from each side on the issue, and once you cut through Dershowitz's abusive "Planet Chomsky" B.S. in the debate, they end up essentially in agreement on one thing: The Taba Summit was a laudable basis for a two-state mideast peace solution.
So . . . if these two adversaries can agree on that, then what the fuck is the holdup? Huh? I don't know what's more ridiculous, the stalling here or the stalling on the legalization of bud. They're both obviously no-brainers. If you will it, it is no dream; am I wrong?
So . . . if these two adversaries can agree on that, then what the fuck is the holdup? Huh? I don't know what's more ridiculous, the stalling here or the stalling on the legalization of bud. They're both obviously no-brainers. If you will it, it is no dream; am I wrong?
 |
| "Checkmate, asshole." |
 |
| "Checkmate, Israeli right wing; you're even more of an asshole than me." |
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
The Economic Left: Irrational Bigots?
[See here for context re: this blog entry's headline title.]
It's no secret that left-liberals fancy themselves more intellectual, more informed, more enlightened, etc. than the population at large. Just look at the makeup of university faculties, after all. The people who spend the most time thinking about things just have this inevitable tendency to lean "left." (The illustrious thinker, Robert Nozick, thinks through why this is, and comes up with a fine explanation: there are plenty of thinkers out there who are also doers, namely, business-creators. You'd be hard-pressed to find Marxists teaching at business schools or running Fortune 500 companies. That requires a kind of smarts and skill-set that Marxists and the rest of their left-wing academic ilk either don't possess or don't much approve of. [I take an example like George Soros to be roughly like a Glenn Greenwaldian "voice of conscience" with extreme financial smarts. An example like Warren Buffett, I don't think would really reflect the left-ward bent in the academic humanities. You'd have to look to the economics departments to get a much closer match.] Of course, to be fair, it does cut both ways; I don't much admire, say, Wall Street philistines who are conspicuously out of touch with the more plausible grievances of the "Occupy" movement, or - put more generally - those who've allowed their own circumstances to bias them and blind them to certain realities.)
I just bracketed-parenthetically mentioned the economics departments. There, you don't see much of a left-ward bent at all; it's a very pragmatic - which is to say, quite centrist - profession. Several Nobel Laureates come from the "right." Many economists are out in the business world. There's this old adage, "those who can't do, teach." According to that adage, the ones who don't go out into the business world, can't do. Teaching is a kind of doing, though, and the adage over-generalizes anyway; it's intended to be partly humorous. But there is a ring of truth to it as well, because it applies to at least some academics - and if employment out in "the real world" is any indication of this, the hard sciences have the greatest number of "doers," the social sciences presumably less so (with economics among the social sciences boldly standing out as the least left-wing), and the humanities presumably even less so. I don't know the percentages, but it just intuitively rings true and Nozick's explanation makes plenty of sense.
This is all preface to the following observation: left-wing teachings when it comes to economic matters tend to be toxic. There's quite a lot of it that not even "mainstream liberals" in the economics profession would endorse. But certain memes get out there among left-wing thinkers and the connection between these memes and (a responsible reading of) the facts is tenuous. Now, take your typical liberal college student, place him or her in a large online social gathering to partake in meme-spreading, and what do you get? The reddit.com politics site. (I count this site as among my daily reads among several others, including the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.) This site is particularly a breeding-ground for "Occupy"-movement memes. The thing with the "Occupy" movement is there are some worthwhile or semi-worthwhile memes all mixed-up with some really toxic ones. I'd like to focus on a very toxic meme in particular, one based on shady numbers, having to do with wealth and income inequality.
The very Marx-inspired narrative feeding this toxic meme is one of continuous impoverishment and immiseration of "the working classes" and, seemingly, of ever-widening inequality, absent the democratically-controlled state stepping in to correct the problem. "Democracy before capitalism" is the basic political ethic going on here. Democracy, properly practiced, will work in the best interests of the People, while capitalism tends to devolve into plutocracy.
We've been bitten once already by Marx's prediction of the collapse of capitalism. (How many times do we need to be bitten before we figure out the real problem here?) Needing some theoretical modifications and looking for some semblance of intellectual leadership, the left these days has latched onto (most prominently) Noam Chomsky. While Chomsky is brilliant and authoritative on many things, and serves as a voice of conscience in the face of American wrong-doings and double-standards, that doesn't mean he's got his economic narrative correct. But he's a darling of the left in any event, and his pronouncements are treated accordingly. Taking his lead, the Economic Left - and its representative end-result on the politics reddit - filters and interprets economic data to fit its narrative-worldview.
Now, to throw a wrench into that whole inequality/immiseration narrative.
(I mean, shouldn't they have known better? Shouldn't they have seen this coming? Shouldn't they have been more objective and fact-oriented?)
Here it is:
(Clickable link in the image. To play the academic-credentialism game: the article is written by Maxim Pinkovskiy, Department of Economics, MIT, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Professor of Economics, Columbia University.)
The really "weird" (read: "counter-intuitive," with special emphasis on the scare qoutes) part about this is that world-scale inequality has fallen as globalization has expanded, and this fall has accelerated after 1990, i.e., after the fall of Communism and after NAFTA and GATT.
Now, why aren't international data on inequality in wealth and income ever cited by the Occupy crowd and their academic enablers? Is it because they're unaware of it? Is it because they've ignored it? Do they consider it irrelevant? Do they consider the data flawed? What might account for the Economic Left's failure to address the most comprehensive and global data set available?
The favorite data of the Economic Left concern wealth and inequality here in the United States, which by all indications is increasing. There seems at least to be an awareness that globalization has something to do with it: many lower-skilled and manufacturing jobs have gone oversees. There's also the effects of illegal immigration taking American jerbs, though that's more of a right-wing meme. While the rich Americans retain residence here, their capital goes more and more abroad, they get the returns from that while the middle-class and poor do not, hence the widening income and wealth gap among Americans.
Left out of the intra-American discussions about the growing wealth and income gap is the effect of globalization on global wealth and income inequalities. It's probably of little consolation to Americans that their now-outsourced jobs improve the quality of lives of foreign workers, but it is nonetheless a fact that needs to be taken into account if we're to build a narrative, correct? If the narrative is "widening inequality in wealth and income," then you'd need to have the data to back that up, right? Some philosopher-level amount of intellectual curiosity should lead people to seek out and consider global data and not just data about Americans, yes?
From the way Chomsky and the reddit-hive-mind tell it, the multinational corporations, seeking Profit over People, ship the jobs oversees where people are exploitatively paid 15 cents an hour, pretty much a deadweight loss for all concerned except for the Evil Corporations/Stockholders. From the way they tell it, you'd expect inequality and immiseration on the world scale to be exacerbated by these turns of events. I mean, isn't that what capitalism without democratic intervention, is all about? That is, after all, the very narrative they push about the American historical experience prior to the New Deal. (Presumably, so the narrative goes, it's what's supposed to happen in any industrially-developing nation.) I strongly suspect we've already been bitten there, too.
The reality of the matter is that while many Americans have it tough and things might well get even worse in the future for them, a global-scale perspective will shed light on the reality of the matter: there are some billions of people around the world who are dirt poor, by American standards, willing to work for improved wages but still dirt cheap, by American standards. If enlightened cosmopolitanism and altruism are supposed to be our motives, we should be welcoming these developments. There seems to be something quite toxic here at work, though: a rejection of economic reality, a rejection driven by fear, envy, prejudice, what have you. Much the same as what happens on the Right when it comes to the Right's pet anti-reality issues.
That being said, there is something to the "Occupy" narrative that all pro-reality people should acknowledge: our government is bought by moneyed interests, and is corrupted accordingly. The People have a large part in letting this happen by electing unenlightened and cynical representatives. So, e.g., while budgetary reality says that deficit reduction will require (in part) raising taxes on the only people who have the money these days, the political reality is the insanity that this isn't even on the table at present (due to the Republicans, who have their own anti-reality narratives on fiscal matters. I.e., supply-side tax cuts make a lot more fiscal and economic sense when marginal tax rates are 70% than when they're in the 30s; and the deceptive "only 50 percent of the people pay taxes" meme should have been dead long ago).
A pox on both of their houses.
[ADDENDUM: A case in point of shady numbers, even applied to the "global" scale. ("On Monday the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a massive 400-page report surveying the state of inequality around the world. The report, United We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising reaffirms that inequality is now rising not just in the United States, but globally." Bold emphasis mine.) The study in this case involves the 34 OECD member countries - which doesn't include China or India (which make up more than a third of the world population) much less more than a hundred other nations. How exactly is that "global"?]
It's no secret that left-liberals fancy themselves more intellectual, more informed, more enlightened, etc. than the population at large. Just look at the makeup of university faculties, after all. The people who spend the most time thinking about things just have this inevitable tendency to lean "left." (The illustrious thinker, Robert Nozick, thinks through why this is, and comes up with a fine explanation: there are plenty of thinkers out there who are also doers, namely, business-creators. You'd be hard-pressed to find Marxists teaching at business schools or running Fortune 500 companies. That requires a kind of smarts and skill-set that Marxists and the rest of their left-wing academic ilk either don't possess or don't much approve of. [I take an example like George Soros to be roughly like a Glenn Greenwaldian "voice of conscience" with extreme financial smarts. An example like Warren Buffett, I don't think would really reflect the left-ward bent in the academic humanities. You'd have to look to the economics departments to get a much closer match.] Of course, to be fair, it does cut both ways; I don't much admire, say, Wall Street philistines who are conspicuously out of touch with the more plausible grievances of the "Occupy" movement, or - put more generally - those who've allowed their own circumstances to bias them and blind them to certain realities.)
I just bracketed-parenthetically mentioned the economics departments. There, you don't see much of a left-ward bent at all; it's a very pragmatic - which is to say, quite centrist - profession. Several Nobel Laureates come from the "right." Many economists are out in the business world. There's this old adage, "those who can't do, teach." According to that adage, the ones who don't go out into the business world, can't do. Teaching is a kind of doing, though, and the adage over-generalizes anyway; it's intended to be partly humorous. But there is a ring of truth to it as well, because it applies to at least some academics - and if employment out in "the real world" is any indication of this, the hard sciences have the greatest number of "doers," the social sciences presumably less so (with economics among the social sciences boldly standing out as the least left-wing), and the humanities presumably even less so. I don't know the percentages, but it just intuitively rings true and Nozick's explanation makes plenty of sense.
This is all preface to the following observation: left-wing teachings when it comes to economic matters tend to be toxic. There's quite a lot of it that not even "mainstream liberals" in the economics profession would endorse. But certain memes get out there among left-wing thinkers and the connection between these memes and (a responsible reading of) the facts is tenuous. Now, take your typical liberal college student, place him or her in a large online social gathering to partake in meme-spreading, and what do you get? The reddit.com politics site. (I count this site as among my daily reads among several others, including the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.) This site is particularly a breeding-ground for "Occupy"-movement memes. The thing with the "Occupy" movement is there are some worthwhile or semi-worthwhile memes all mixed-up with some really toxic ones. I'd like to focus on a very toxic meme in particular, one based on shady numbers, having to do with wealth and income inequality.
The very Marx-inspired narrative feeding this toxic meme is one of continuous impoverishment and immiseration of "the working classes" and, seemingly, of ever-widening inequality, absent the democratically-controlled state stepping in to correct the problem. "Democracy before capitalism" is the basic political ethic going on here. Democracy, properly practiced, will work in the best interests of the People, while capitalism tends to devolve into plutocracy.
We've been bitten once already by Marx's prediction of the collapse of capitalism. (How many times do we need to be bitten before we figure out the real problem here?) Needing some theoretical modifications and looking for some semblance of intellectual leadership, the left these days has latched onto (most prominently) Noam Chomsky. While Chomsky is brilliant and authoritative on many things, and serves as a voice of conscience in the face of American wrong-doings and double-standards, that doesn't mean he's got his economic narrative correct. But he's a darling of the left in any event, and his pronouncements are treated accordingly. Taking his lead, the Economic Left - and its representative end-result on the politics reddit - filters and interprets economic data to fit its narrative-worldview.
Now, to throw a wrench into that whole inequality/immiseration narrative.
(I mean, shouldn't they have known better? Shouldn't they have seen this coming? Shouldn't they have been more objective and fact-oriented?)
Here it is:
(Clickable link in the image. To play the academic-credentialism game: the article is written by Maxim Pinkovskiy, Department of Economics, MIT, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Professor of Economics, Columbia University.)
The really "weird" (read: "counter-intuitive," with special emphasis on the scare qoutes) part about this is that world-scale inequality has fallen as globalization has expanded, and this fall has accelerated after 1990, i.e., after the fall of Communism and after NAFTA and GATT.
Now, why aren't international data on inequality in wealth and income ever cited by the Occupy crowd and their academic enablers? Is it because they're unaware of it? Is it because they've ignored it? Do they consider it irrelevant? Do they consider the data flawed? What might account for the Economic Left's failure to address the most comprehensive and global data set available?
The favorite data of the Economic Left concern wealth and inequality here in the United States, which by all indications is increasing. There seems at least to be an awareness that globalization has something to do with it: many lower-skilled and manufacturing jobs have gone oversees. There's also the effects of illegal immigration taking American jerbs, though that's more of a right-wing meme. While the rich Americans retain residence here, their capital goes more and more abroad, they get the returns from that while the middle-class and poor do not, hence the widening income and wealth gap among Americans.
Left out of the intra-American discussions about the growing wealth and income gap is the effect of globalization on global wealth and income inequalities. It's probably of little consolation to Americans that their now-outsourced jobs improve the quality of lives of foreign workers, but it is nonetheless a fact that needs to be taken into account if we're to build a narrative, correct? If the narrative is "widening inequality in wealth and income," then you'd need to have the data to back that up, right? Some philosopher-level amount of intellectual curiosity should lead people to seek out and consider global data and not just data about Americans, yes?
From the way Chomsky and the reddit-hive-mind tell it, the multinational corporations, seeking Profit over People, ship the jobs oversees where people are exploitatively paid 15 cents an hour, pretty much a deadweight loss for all concerned except for the Evil Corporations/Stockholders. From the way they tell it, you'd expect inequality and immiseration on the world scale to be exacerbated by these turns of events. I mean, isn't that what capitalism without democratic intervention, is all about? That is, after all, the very narrative they push about the American historical experience prior to the New Deal. (Presumably, so the narrative goes, it's what's supposed to happen in any industrially-developing nation.) I strongly suspect we've already been bitten there, too.
The reality of the matter is that while many Americans have it tough and things might well get even worse in the future for them, a global-scale perspective will shed light on the reality of the matter: there are some billions of people around the world who are dirt poor, by American standards, willing to work for improved wages but still dirt cheap, by American standards. If enlightened cosmopolitanism and altruism are supposed to be our motives, we should be welcoming these developments. There seems to be something quite toxic here at work, though: a rejection of economic reality, a rejection driven by fear, envy, prejudice, what have you. Much the same as what happens on the Right when it comes to the Right's pet anti-reality issues.
That being said, there is something to the "Occupy" narrative that all pro-reality people should acknowledge: our government is bought by moneyed interests, and is corrupted accordingly. The People have a large part in letting this happen by electing unenlightened and cynical representatives. So, e.g., while budgetary reality says that deficit reduction will require (in part) raising taxes on the only people who have the money these days, the political reality is the insanity that this isn't even on the table at present (due to the Republicans, who have their own anti-reality narratives on fiscal matters. I.e., supply-side tax cuts make a lot more fiscal and economic sense when marginal tax rates are 70% than when they're in the 30s; and the deceptive "only 50 percent of the people pay taxes" meme should have been dead long ago).
A pox on both of their houses.
[ADDENDUM: A case in point of shady numbers, even applied to the "global" scale. ("On Monday the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a massive 400-page report surveying the state of inequality around the world. The report, United We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising reaffirms that inequality is now rising not just in the United States, but globally." Bold emphasis mine.) The study in this case involves the 34 OECD member countries - which doesn't include China or India (which make up more than a third of the world population) much less more than a hundred other nations. How exactly is that "global"?]
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Blog Resumption?
I may return to normal blogging soon; the insane "debt-ceiling debate" and the fiscal trainwreck ahead is tempting enough in its own right to comment on.
I'd like to mention a recent read that I found highly readable and "entertaining": Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. It's a great introduction for the layperson to the workings of a brilliant mind. (The footnotes themselves are hundreds of pages worth, compiled at the book's website.) I don't agree with some of his analyses on economics (namely, that corporations almost universally benefit at the expense of peoples), but he is nonetheless very perceptive about the dynamics of power in the world today, even were we to assume a pro-capitalist, pro-corporation-in-principle point of view. It is true: corporations have managed to buy elections and work in conjunction with states to exploit peoples around the world. It's not something Ayn Rand and other advocates of capitalism would support. I did catch two instances where Chomsky states facts in a misleading way: (1) That slaves as 3/5 persons is "in the Constitution." By the same token, Prohibition is "in the Constitution," but so what? (2) That under Clinton, the defense budget exceeded the Cold War average. But it certainly didn't as a share of GDP, even if it did in absolute terms. A ton of other facts he cites I simply am not up on, but I suspect some of them are stated misleadingly.
I also schlepped through Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment recently. I may have something substantive to say in reaction to he book in due course, beyond pointing out the fact that it's very dry and tedious, that it sets forth an intriguing theory of rights to freedom-and-wellbeing, and that it is argued very thoroughly. I just wish it were argued way more accessibly. Sigh.
I tried Nozick's Philosophical Explanations and The Examined Life; the former was not all that accessible, while the latter had a hard time holding my attention.
I also went through the post-1950 portion of Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made; among other things I discovered that a Daryn Kent was most likely the unnamed young woman "put on trial" as described in Barbara Branden's biography of Rand. Another thing I can't really do at this point is to form a coherent, context-sensitive picture of Rand the person based on all the things others have said about her. There are a total of 100 accounts in 100 Voices that conflict with some 100 or so accounts in Heller's book. If you see Rand the way Leonard Peikoff sees her, you see someone of staggering genius, insight, rationality, and character, who could argue anyone she met into a corner. If you see her as a good number of NBI-days ex-Objectivists and ex-close-associates see her, you see a domineering diva who's nonetheless a staggering genius. And it's all things other people have said. (Heller basically sides with the latter crowd, since she didn't have much of the former type to rely on as a source. She said she was denied access to the archives because she didn't agree with Rand's ideas; I think it had more to do with the fact that she was going to the Brandens as a leading source. Heller does get a good number of facts wrong that more meticulous fact-checking would correct, BTW.) The Ayn Rand I know is the Rand that appeared in print and in some public forums, including the Donahue show. The Rand I see on the Donahue show is one I find enjoyable to watch. The Ayn Rand that might be and ought to be is, of course, the Ayn Rand we'd all want to know, and there's a shit-ton of that Ayn Rand in her writings. (I still think she gets some things wrong about, e.g., Kant, and I'm still not up on what's great about the speech-filled dialogues in Atlas, but I'll spiral back to all this in due course.)
Heller's book is also very wordy and repetitive, for what that's worth. Anyway, for the latest Rand-related gossip, it's a "good" source. It's not clear Heller has anywhere near the kind of grasp of Objectivism that a student of Peikoff's does, which definitely makes a difference in how one might perceive Rand the person (e.g., with one's method of judgment). That's one big context about Peikoff that Heller simply misses. If Rand says in a general letter of recommendation that Peikoff has a "superlative" understanding of Objectivism, one would do well to study Peikoff's work carefully to understand the philosophy better, and it's pretty clear Heller didn't do that. I'm still waiting for that other shoe to drop, the "definitive" biography from the ARI.
And I think I still have a book in the works; it is evolving into I-don't-know-what at this point. I want it to be pretty excellent, though, even if not absolutely, ahem, perfect.
(Next up on the reading list: Mayhew-edited volumes of essays on The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged - here and here.)
I'd like to mention a recent read that I found highly readable and "entertaining": Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. It's a great introduction for the layperson to the workings of a brilliant mind. (The footnotes themselves are hundreds of pages worth, compiled at the book's website.) I don't agree with some of his analyses on economics (namely, that corporations almost universally benefit at the expense of peoples), but he is nonetheless very perceptive about the dynamics of power in the world today, even were we to assume a pro-capitalist, pro-corporation-in-principle point of view. It is true: corporations have managed to buy elections and work in conjunction with states to exploit peoples around the world. It's not something Ayn Rand and other advocates of capitalism would support. I did catch two instances where Chomsky states facts in a misleading way: (1) That slaves as 3/5 persons is "in the Constitution." By the same token, Prohibition is "in the Constitution," but so what? (2) That under Clinton, the defense budget exceeded the Cold War average. But it certainly didn't as a share of GDP, even if it did in absolute terms. A ton of other facts he cites I simply am not up on, but I suspect some of them are stated misleadingly.
I also schlepped through Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment recently. I may have something substantive to say in reaction to he book in due course, beyond pointing out the fact that it's very dry and tedious, that it sets forth an intriguing theory of rights to freedom-and-wellbeing, and that it is argued very thoroughly. I just wish it were argued way more accessibly. Sigh.
I tried Nozick's Philosophical Explanations and The Examined Life; the former was not all that accessible, while the latter had a hard time holding my attention.
I also went through the post-1950 portion of Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made; among other things I discovered that a Daryn Kent was most likely the unnamed young woman "put on trial" as described in Barbara Branden's biography of Rand. Another thing I can't really do at this point is to form a coherent, context-sensitive picture of Rand the person based on all the things others have said about her. There are a total of 100 accounts in 100 Voices that conflict with some 100 or so accounts in Heller's book. If you see Rand the way Leonard Peikoff sees her, you see someone of staggering genius, insight, rationality, and character, who could argue anyone she met into a corner. If you see her as a good number of NBI-days ex-Objectivists and ex-close-associates see her, you see a domineering diva who's nonetheless a staggering genius. And it's all things other people have said. (Heller basically sides with the latter crowd, since she didn't have much of the former type to rely on as a source. She said she was denied access to the archives because she didn't agree with Rand's ideas; I think it had more to do with the fact that she was going to the Brandens as a leading source. Heller does get a good number of facts wrong that more meticulous fact-checking would correct, BTW.) The Ayn Rand I know is the Rand that appeared in print and in some public forums, including the Donahue show. The Rand I see on the Donahue show is one I find enjoyable to watch. The Ayn Rand that might be and ought to be is, of course, the Ayn Rand we'd all want to know, and there's a shit-ton of that Ayn Rand in her writings. (I still think she gets some things wrong about, e.g., Kant, and I'm still not up on what's great about the speech-filled dialogues in Atlas, but I'll spiral back to all this in due course.)
Heller's book is also very wordy and repetitive, for what that's worth. Anyway, for the latest Rand-related gossip, it's a "good" source. It's not clear Heller has anywhere near the kind of grasp of Objectivism that a student of Peikoff's does, which definitely makes a difference in how one might perceive Rand the person (e.g., with one's method of judgment). That's one big context about Peikoff that Heller simply misses. If Rand says in a general letter of recommendation that Peikoff has a "superlative" understanding of Objectivism, one would do well to study Peikoff's work carefully to understand the philosophy better, and it's pretty clear Heller didn't do that. I'm still waiting for that other shoe to drop, the "definitive" biography from the ARI.
And I think I still have a book in the works; it is evolving into I-don't-know-what at this point. I want it to be pretty excellent, though, even if not absolutely, ahem, perfect.
(Next up on the reading list: Mayhew-edited volumes of essays on The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged - here and here.)
Friday, March 18, 2011
When Geniuses Fuck Up
In rummaging around (in the spirit of perfective comprehensiveness) for anything Noam Chomsky said about Ayn Rand, the first and prominent result points to this. Chomsky said:
To further stress the "integration" theme, can we also say that Kant fucked up with his inescapably radical subjectivism, his radical distinction between appearance and the mysterious thing-in-itself (most obviously blowing up in his face when positing on a compatibility between natural necessity and freedom of the will), and with his flimsy rejection of eudaemonism in ethics?
Rand, of course, provides for a corrective in this matters, by distinguishing errors of knowledge from breaches of morality. Applying that distinction, all three of these geniuses fucked up, but rightful ascriptions of evil to someone requires more evidence than of their having fucked up, or of their having faulty thinking processes (like those that the dualistic/non-integrative and therefore not-very-practically-useful Cartesian-Humean-Kantian - i.e., non-Aristotelian - model of thought encourages).
What is, after all, each thinker's context?
At the least, we can say that Chomsky, on some things, is a flat-out ignoramus who knows not of what he speaks. What remains open is whether Chomsky should easily have known better than to be ignorant of Rand's actual ideas (or of the other prominent libertarian intellectuals Chomsky bashes so boldly in that interview). Rand, for her own part, actually once gave positive mention of a review of Skinner by Chomsky, in "The Stimulus and the Response" (Philosophy: Who Needs It). She qualified her comments by noting that he was part of the New Left. A far cry from the idiocy Chomsky showed in return.
From the way he speaks and analyzes things, Chomsky is clearly brilliant and hits upon a great number of quality insights, but he can also be way in over his head on some matters of which speaks, and he doesn't seem to realize when he's way in over his head, which is an intellectual vice on his part. His antipathy to capitalism has really been insidious and costly to his credibility in matters of social science. And his powers of analysis definitely do not meet or exceed Ayn Rand's. Nor, in political economy, could they hope to match Mises's. That's why he's the Linguist, Mises the Economist, and Rand the Philosopher. But Rand did fuck up about Kant, who also fucked up, and his fuck-up was of greater philosophical significance and insidiousness. (For evidence, see the intellectual state of Europe today, base and ignoble sophists running too and fro, wallowing in a subjectivist paradigm. America's doing what America would do - slowly and surely integrating Aristotle and Aristotelianism, including Randism.) The only one here who hardly ever fucked up at all in his analyses, is Mises, a most perfective thinker. Just so we're clear on all that.
Rand in my view is one of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history.As a person fanatically prone to differentiation and integration, my mind went quite quickly to this statement by Ayn Rand:
Kant is the most evil man in mankind’s history.Both Chomsky and Rand fucked up here. The difference is that Chomsky is just way more clueless about Rand than Rand was about Kant. A further difference, one highlighting the intellectual corruption that pervades the American Left, is that Chomsky gets a free pass from them on fuck-ups like this, while Rand does not. (So much for any pretense by the American Left to an intellectual high-ground.)
To further stress the "integration" theme, can we also say that Kant fucked up with his inescapably radical subjectivism, his radical distinction between appearance and the mysterious thing-in-itself (most obviously blowing up in his face when positing on a compatibility between natural necessity and freedom of the will), and with his flimsy rejection of eudaemonism in ethics?
Rand, of course, provides for a corrective in this matters, by distinguishing errors of knowledge from breaches of morality. Applying that distinction, all three of these geniuses fucked up, but rightful ascriptions of evil to someone requires more evidence than of their having fucked up, or of their having faulty thinking processes (like those that the dualistic/non-integrative and therefore not-very-practically-useful Cartesian-Humean-Kantian - i.e., non-Aristotelian - model of thought encourages).
What is, after all, each thinker's context?
At the least, we can say that Chomsky, on some things, is a flat-out ignoramus who knows not of what he speaks. What remains open is whether Chomsky should easily have known better than to be ignorant of Rand's actual ideas (or of the other prominent libertarian intellectuals Chomsky bashes so boldly in that interview). Rand, for her own part, actually once gave positive mention of a review of Skinner by Chomsky, in "The Stimulus and the Response" (Philosophy: Who Needs It). She qualified her comments by noting that he was part of the New Left. A far cry from the idiocy Chomsky showed in return.
From the way he speaks and analyzes things, Chomsky is clearly brilliant and hits upon a great number of quality insights, but he can also be way in over his head on some matters of which speaks, and he doesn't seem to realize when he's way in over his head, which is an intellectual vice on his part. His antipathy to capitalism has really been insidious and costly to his credibility in matters of social science. And his powers of analysis definitely do not meet or exceed Ayn Rand's. Nor, in political economy, could they hope to match Mises's. That's why he's the Linguist, Mises the Economist, and Rand the Philosopher. But Rand did fuck up about Kant, who also fucked up, and his fuck-up was of greater philosophical significance and insidiousness. (For evidence, see the intellectual state of Europe today, base and ignoble sophists running too and fro, wallowing in a subjectivist paradigm. America's doing what America would do - slowly and surely integrating Aristotle and Aristotelianism, including Randism.) The only one here who hardly ever fucked up at all in his analyses, is Mises, a most perfective thinker. Just so we're clear on all that.
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